Recently, some readers asked for posts that were more game-design centered. Since there was talk recently of the virtual ecological modeling that a Second Life user created, I thought I might talk a little bit about how the original resource system in Ultima Online worked. It’s more virtual world design than game design, but it has a lot of implications for game systems. Pretty much everything I am writing here has been published before in one place or another, but a lot of the old UO interviews and articles are not on the Internet, so it’s all been lost, and I imagine folks newer to the whole virtual world thing may never have heard about it.

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I swear, this is probably the last Metaverse Summit post, at least until they hold another summit.

Janna Anderson of Elon University and the Pew Internet Project’s “Imagining the Internet” project has posted up audio and video of interviews done while at the Summit. The questions posed included:

• What would you ask policymakers to do to ensure a positive future for networked technologies?
• What is your most fervent hope for the future of networked technologies?
• What is your greatest fear for the future of networked technologies?
• During the next decade, what technology will have the greatest impact on our everyday lives?
• Looking more than 10 years in the future, what technological development will have the greatest impact on society?

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Looks like the San Diego chapter of the IGDA is getting going again!

With the release of the latest edition of SirBruce’s chart of MMO populations, the debates have once again erupted over not only the validity of the numbers, but also over the how to even talk about the populations of these virtual worlds. It’s a discussion that has come up before, of course.

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